Joint Review

pg. 36: To cultivate a culture of systemic oversight and collective responsibility for coherence among their group, leaders should direct the IMF, World Bank, ILO and WTO to prepare each year for their review a joint annual report on the performance of the world economy. This report should be signed by the heads of the organizations and be made a standing item for discussion on summit agendas. It should analyze trends in growth in economic activity, trade, capital flows, employment and living standards, and document how these multilateral institutions are working together to improve these trends. Strengthening the joint accountability of these institutions to heads of government should improve cooperation among them and help ensure that all relevant international economic policy tools are being applied in an integrated fashion to the challenge of maximizing the contribution to global growth and broad living standards of global economic integration

Readers' Guide Comment on “IMF, World Bank, ILO, and WTO”

The G20 in 2009 and 2010 requested that the IMF alone provide the G20 with a report on the state of the world economy. WEF’s recommendation is to expand this function to four international organizations.

It is interesting to note that the United Nations is not one of these four organizations, even though UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) already release a joint annual report at the start of each calendar year. The World Economic Situation and Prospects: Global Outlook (WESP), prepared annually for over a decade, has been largely ignored by the business community and OECD governments, who often feel that it does not reflect their self-interests. Of the four organizations selected by GRI to provide their global report, two, the IMF and the WTO, are very proud of their restrictive, narrow agendas (IMF on monetary matters and WTO on trade). Only one of the four organizations has day-to-day engagement with social, labor, environmental, or cultural issues. GRI’s call for a global report card then is heavily weighted against global social, developmental, and ecological concerns.

Readers' Guide Comment on “strengthening the joint accountability [of the four organizations] … to the heads of government”

The accountability is to a selective group of heads of government, not all heads of government. The effect of this proposal is to concentrate the attention of the heads of these agencies on the G20 countries, not on the remainder of the membership or on those countries/regions which have been extended quota and voting shares in the respective governing bodies.

GRI wants the new global report to address the ‘challenge of maximizing the contribution to global growth and broad living standards of global economic integration.’ The choice of the new and undefined terminology, ‘broad living standards of global economic integration,’ suggests that Davos considers irrelevant the long-standing concerns for ‘development,' ‘living wages,’ and ‘Millennium Development Goals.’